Psychoanalysis and Motivation

Carrying forward his inquiry into the nature and conditions of normal and abnormal development Lichtenberg focuses on motivation. His goal is to offer an alternative to psychoanalytic drive theory that accommodates the developmental insights of infancy research while accounting for the entire range of phenomena addressed by the theory of instinctual drives. To this end he propounds a comprehensive theory of the self which then gains expression in five discrete yet interactive motivational systems.